Student-built photometers in the instrumental analysis lab

In ideal conditions, student laboratory experiences are hands-on, inquiry-based, and collaborative, but the circumstances of the past year have made this harder than usual. Among the many options that faculty are exploring for remote or socially distanced labs, one possibility is an instrument-building project in which students construct their own photometers for absorbance or fluorescence measurements. In this talk, I will review the extensive pedagogical literature on home-built spectroscopy instrumentation and describe an inexpensive, flexible photometer building kit that faculty can assemble for students to design their own device(s) to measure absorbance and/or fluorescence. Finally, I will describe how I have fit this activity into a broader portfolio-based lab experience for an instrumental analysis course.